Caching East Sooke Park with magicman65

On May 18th, 2013 I got together with my friend and fellow geocaching blogger magicman65 to do some serious caching in East Sooke Park.  Just Leafy really wanted to be a part of this adventure, but sadly she had to work that night.  This meant that she had to sleep all day to be ready for that long 12hr shift.

I woke up with great enthusiasm, walking to the blinds to our patio door and opened them to a sight I was hoping not to see.... rain!  But I still had hope as the rain was light and the clouds looked high in the sky.
You have to understand that I am a fair weather cacher.  I just can not stand getting wet in the rain.  Just Leafy likes to tease me and say things like "Oh you don't like getting wet, so why do you swim" or things like "You don't like getting wet, but you shower".  But as I said just above, I don't like getting wet in the RAIN!

Pulling out my phone I opened up Facebook and sent magicman65 a message to tell him what it was like out here by my home, and to my surprise his response was that it wasn't raining out there at his.
Now I know that Victoria/Saanich and the Westshore Communities tend to have slightly different weather from each other; however  now the question was, what was it going to be like in East Sooke.
Well it was was time to find out, and that meant getting in the car and heading out.

Well I tell you, the difference from in town to the Westshore was staggering.  About when I got to my exit into Colwood there was nothing but sun and blue sky.  I was floored!
I got to magicman65 and Angel Cheeks' place and parked the car pretty much right on time for our meet up of 10:00am, loaded up into his truck and away we went.

We arrived at the parking lot and got right to work.  We attempted one that I had got before "GC23V14 - get err of", but soon discovered it had a few DNFs (Did Not Finds) attached to it.  This caused us to call of that search, and we moved on.
This trail was familiar to me, and you readers will have read about it before.  Let's go back to Easter Weekend last year, you may remember that Just Leafy and I came out to ESP (East Sooke Park) with Paulboy.  If you haven't read it, you can find it by clicking HERE.  We did this very same trail loop back then!  Amandazon who owns the majority of the caches here archived the old ones and released a new set in the same locations.

This worked out very well for magicman65 and I, and we decided to make it a fresh new experience for me by doing the loop in the opposite direction to what we did a year ago.

What a day it was.  It was neat doing it the way we did, as I could not
predict the cache locations or the dips and climbs of the trail.  All the while we talked about everything geocaching (of course), and my up coming wedding.
We saw so many neat things along the trail on this trip, from cool insects like Centipedes and Black Beetles, to multiple trees growing out of the large horizontal limb of another tree, to smiling faces in the stumps.

All the caches we did were dry and in good condition.  And although they were all micros in the woods, they
were all trail side and easy to find.  This is great because it minimizes the impact on the surrounding environment.
Taking our time and having fun along the way we completed the circuit in about 5.5hrs and walked 12.9km, netting ourselves about 23 finds.  And returning to the truck we headed home.


Thanks magicman65 for such a fun day in ESP, and thank you Amandazon and all the other cachers who hid caches along this trail.  Without your contributions to the area this day could not have happened.

If you would like to read about magicman65's geocaching adventures, be sure to click on the banner below to link to his geocaching blog.  And don't forget to subscribe to receive notifications when he posts something new!